Door-To-Door Mail Delivery To End Under New Plan 867
First time accepted submitter Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that under a cost-saving plan by the US Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters. 'Converting delivery away from door delivery to either curb line or centralized delivery would enable the Postal Service to provide service to more customers in less time,' says Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan. More than 30 million American homes get door-to-door delivery and another 50 million get their mail dropped at their curbside mailboxes. But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses, sees savings in centralized mail delivery. Door-to-door delivery costs the Postal Service about $353 per address each year while curbside delivery costs $224, and cluster boxes cost $160 per address. But unions say it's a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled. 'It's madness,' says Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. 'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"
Frequency vs. Distance (Score:5, Interesting)
I think most Americans would rather give up Saturday delivery than have to walk farther to get their mail. I would be happy with just MWF delivery, but I would not want to have to walk to the end of our block to a cluster box.
Plus secure parcel delivery (Score:4, Interesting)
Great for parcels (Score:5, Interesting)
I've lived in places with the mailbox-cluster idea in Canada. Personally, I love it. It's especially great for parcels that would otherwise be left on a doorstep or taken back to a depot.
What happens here is that the mailbox-clusters have a a small number of large mailboxes. If you have a parcel, it goes in one of the large mailboxes. Then the key to that mailbox is put in your personal mailbox. You open it, take your parcel, and lock the key inside. Awesome.
door to door delivery boosted USPS profits (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the Civil War, you had to go to the local post office to pick up your mail.
In 1863, Postmaster Montgomery Blair petitioned congress to "promote the public convenience" by providing free home delivery in cities, and argued - correctly, it turns out - that the resultant increase in postal usage would offset the delivery cost and yield a profit. Free rural delivery followed around the turn of the century.
Others at the time argued that whether home delivery yielded a profit was irrelevant, since government entities should be more concerned with civic duty than profit. It's a balance, for sure, but I wish the civic duty sentiment were more common today, or at least to acknowledge the trade-off.
Dear USPS, (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear USPS,
Please forward all photographs you've taken of my mail to my email address. This way, I can predetermine, for you, if I even want said articles of mail delivered to my address. I am sure precluding bulk mailings and advertisements from delivery to my address will save the USPS even more money.
On second thought, could you just open my mail for me before you photograph it? I can just read my mail in the photos and save you the trouble of delivering anything.
Thanks,
Bob the Recycling Dude
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Face it, we don't get any mail anymore that can't wait a day.
I do. One of my credit card companies is trying to force me to go paperless, so they're delaying the processing on the outgoing statement, putting a ridiculously short due date on it, and then applying late fees when my check doesn't show up in time. A couple of other companies, including my city water department, are pulling the same stunt.
This is the kind of company I'll feel just peachy about letting have unfettered access to my bank account? Right.
Oh, I should add, to keep from getting socked with a late fee two months ago when I realized my statement hadn't come, I called these slime on the phone and paid that way. They screwed up the account number, the payment was refused, and instead of notifying me of the problem in a timely manner they simply added a late fee to the next bill. And since the previous bill wasn't paid, they sent the matter to their collections department, so I started getting calls once an hour at 8AM in the morning. The third one actually had a customer service person (predictive dialers should be outlawed), who asked me for account number and other identifying information before she could tell me why she was calling. Right. Sure.
When I spoke to a supervisor about the problem, she claimed that they did try calling me to tell me about the failed payment. It was "in the computer". I promptly picked up my caller ID box and scrolled back through the last month's worth of calls and found nothing from them and told her so. Her response? "Let's move forward...". And I pointed out that the reason I was calling them was because THIS months statement hadn't arrived yet, either.
So, yes, a day can make a difference.
Done for years in Canada (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, it's crazy that nobody will walk to get their mail. Except millions of Canadians do it every day, and have been for years. They don't get winter in Canada, do they?
The main difference between the two postal systems is that Canada Post is strongly discouraged to lose money. So when they saw mail volumes declining, they started acting to reduce costs. Every new neighborhood gets a community mailbox, where every house has a locked box in that larger group of boxes (what's called a cluster box in the summary). The mail goes there. The end result is that far fewer staff are needed to deliver the mail, which makes it cheaper. You can drop off letters to be delivered, and small packages are also delivered there (or delivered to the door, depending on the service level). In my small city, there's one big post office and two smaller ones inside pharmacies scattered around the city for if you want to mail parcels or pick up items too big for the boxes.
Because it's a Crown Corporation, management has some autonomy to enact changes like that, as the government can't step in as easily as Congress can (and has, in the case of blocking the end of Saturday delivery). The real problem here is less the USPS and more that the USPS isn't allowed to change anything without reactionaries in Congress interfering.
Re:Already happening (Score:4, Interesting)
It's already "nationalized", it's just run as a private corporation rather than a Federal agency. It's actually much better that way; most Federal agencies are horribly mismangaged and wasteful; the USPS is actually extremely efficient and well-run. If it weren't for Congress meddling with it, at the behest of lobbyists, they wouldn't have this problem, and they'd be profitable. Also, the USPS has been independent since 1971; that's long before UPS and FedEx were the heavyweights they are now.
Turning it into a Federal agency wouldn't change Congressional meddling. Congress can just as easily meddle with a Federal agency as with a government-owned corporation, and actually moreso. As a separate entity, it's easy to see how the USPS is doing and it has more isolation from stupid politics; Congress has to actually pass laws and such to affect the USPS's operations and behavior. A Federal agency, OTOH, is completely up to the whims of the guy in the White House (as well as the budget-makers in Congress), and things there can change radically every time someone new is elected or Congress decides to do something stupid like cut their budget. The way it is now, Congress has no real say over the USPS's budget or how they handle their money, except for legal mandates like this stupid pension-funding law. Congress can't just yank their funding for no reason, the way they can with every other Federal agency; the USPS is entirely self-funded, and uses no taxpayer money to operate. Change that to a Federal agency, and its revenues would go into the Treasury, and its operating costs would come out of the Treasury, being entirely comingled. It'd be very easy for Congress to simply defund the USPS (regardless of how much money they're making in revenue), cripple it, then point to that and say "look! It doesn't work! We need to eliminate it!" and then pass a new law to eliminate the USPS altogether, or sell it off to a private corporation.
Maybe you should try actually educating yourself about the USPS and the issues involved, and also about how the US government works (which obviously you don't know much about, since you're not American, obvious by your spelling of "nationalise"), before spouting a bunch of nonsense.
The only way to fix the issues facing the USPS is to fix the US government itself, and the corruption which has completely taken it over. The problems with the USPS are just minor symptoms of much, much larger problems with the US federal government, all caused by extreme corruption, turning into an entirely undemocratic, mercantilist/corporatist (some might say fascist) government. The way I see it, it's entirely hopeless at this point, and the only thing to do is wait for it to collapse under its own weight, just like the Roman Empire did.
Re:Already happening (Score:1, Interesting)
Yes, yes, evil republicans are to blame for everything.
If you haven't noticed, everyone everywhere has a similar budget crisis with fixed-benefit retirement plans. Funding was based on 90s-boom-era assumptions about stock market performance that spent the last 13 years not happening, and pension plans in general are in serious trouble. It's fiscally impossible in many places to continue offering the same pension plan going forward, and unless things start to improve existing promises are in trouble.
In the county in Cali where I used to live, to meet the new ratings agency rules needed to continue to borrow money through bonds, they needed to start funding their pension plan using realistic assumptions about stick market performance. That turned out to mean ~100% of revenue had to go into the pension plan (and they have no reasonable way to raise additional revenue). Bankruptcy is inevitable, followed by default on at least some pension obligations (as Cali has no money to bail them out). I decided to leave before the place started to look like Detroit.
Re:End the monopoly. (Score:4, Interesting)
Normal here... (Score:3, Interesting)
In my case, it's a bit of a pain since my front gate is 2km from my house, but our mail-lady more than makes up for that by collecting as well as delivering mail. All I have to do is put my (stamped) mail to be delivered in the mailbox, and put any sort of flag on the outside. Not that I need to do this very often, but the option is so civilised as to be almost unbelievable in this day and age.
Re:Already happening (Score:5, Interesting)
The USPS has to go to each address each day, to see if there's any mail to be picked up. Customers could conceivably go to a cluster only once every one or two weeks.Until you account for this asymmetry, your accounting is defective.
That you are jealous of those who have earned a better life than you, is neither a good argument nor an indication of good character.
Different is not better. I live in a city in a nice apartment, a 2 minute walk to the train that takes me to work (2 or 3 days/week I make the 30 minute bike ride to work), a thousand acre park nearby where I can do my morning runs and attend concerts and other events throughout the year, a grocery store 3 blocks away, over a dozen bars and restaurants within a 15 minute walk from home, a real butcher and baker within a 10 minute walk. I have a car, but only use it on weekends and since I only fill up the tank once a month or less, I don't care if gas is $3/gallon or $6/gallon.
Trust me, I don't dream of a sprawling rural lifestyle where I need to drive 30 minutes to town to buy food when surprise guests stop by for dinner. Some people *do* want that lifestyle, but I don't see why I should subsidize them.
Re:Already happening (Score:4, Interesting)
So you wouldn't mind paying back the FCC universal service fund subsides that help deliver your phone and internet service?
I'd pay them because it would be fair. However, in this particular case AT&T is no longer providing my Internet connection because they scrapped DSL equipment and focused on U-Verse or whatever it is that works only in cities. Now I have a pretty good dish that reaches the nearest tower of Clear.net. I can get up to 5 Mbps down / 1 Mbps up this way, for half the price. I have the land line, but I rarely need it, and I can give it up. (My AT&T microcell at home works over Internet.)
Even city dwellers manage to operate ham radios - VHF/UHF obviously has a lot of activity (and antennas are small and easy to disguise), but even HF is possible if you're creative
The apartment building was full of fluorescent lights, and more were in the street. I had noise at S9+ and couldn't get any signal at all. Perhaps a repeater at 2m would be an option, but there is no challenge in that. Push the button and talk; there isn't much else you can do.
I know people that set up a buddipole outside in a clear area with good results...
I have a Buddistick, and it is pretty good for such a compact antenna. But as every other high impedance antenna, it is narrowband, and it still won't work if there are hundreds of fluorescent lights all over you (in corridors, and at neighbors.) Now I have a proper, full height HF9V, half a mile away from the nearest neighbor, and the difference is astonishing.
take it to the beach for even better results.
It would look funny if you go to a beach at midnight to work some DX at 40m or 80m :-) Besides, that Buddi* won't be very good at those bands (it doesn't support them, IIRC.) Working a 24h or 48h contest from a beach ... well, Field Day, perhaps, but not much else :-) You are talking about an incidental QSO now and then, to test the equipment. That you can always do. But if you are aiming for a bit more, like an award perhaps, you need to try harder. My FT-950 costs too much to operate it at the beach, where dust, salt and heat are plentiful.
If I want to use a machine shop or 3D printer, rather than spending money building my own small shop, I can join a hackerspace and have access to far better equipment than I could afford on my own
That is not the answer. You are telling me why I shouldn't be needing what I need. That's an entirely different discussion. Today you can have a 3D printer kit for a $999 [seemecnc.com]. A friend is already assembling that kit. It's not dirt cheap, but hobbies don't have to be cheap, especially if you don't drink and don't smoke (those "hobbies" are far more expensive.) You live only once; spend your money while you can - the last suit has no pockets. Besides, techies like myself are well paid, and I can afford gizmos like that.
Some of my friends rebuild cars - some are in love with old cars, other are building racing cars; yet another friend is a motorbike aficionado. You can't tell them to keep their projects in the club. There are other issues with machines, though. They require careful alignment before you can use them. That alignment takes time, and if you are the owner you know what was done and what was not done, so you don't have to recalibrate everything [youtube.com] each time you walk up to the mill. There is value in owning your tools.
Re:Every other day delivery is much better..... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, its not unfair. What is unfair is the fact that many other public sector workers are likely to get fucked out of their pensions. Detroit isnt the first city to declare bankruptcy because of their growing pension problem. The list is growing, and within 10 years it will be hundreds of cities (its already dozens.)
Wake the fuck up. Public sector unions never should have been able to negotiate pension deals that werent based on the immediate funding of them. The public sector workers of Detroit, in concert with the local officials, were trying to steal from future (often too young to vote, or not even born yet) tax payers when they negotiated their packages 20+ years ago.
Now onto your partisan bullshit. You are claiming that Detroit is a conservative city? Really? There is no city in the world that has more influential unions. Detroit is a union city, ruined by union policies.
Because Congress' goal is to privatize the USPS (Score:5, Interesting)
Why don't we just let the price of stamps rise to where it makes sense, instead?
Because that would allow the USPS to continue operating smoothly, and is thus illegal.
The goal of both parties of Congress is to sell off the lucrative USPS to private interests. In order to do that Congress and its owners must trick the public into believing their valuable USPS is a failing, worthless business.
The USPS cannot - by law - raise the price of stamps by anything more than the "rate of inflation" the government announces. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a politically-motivated number, since higher rates of inflation reflect badly on politicians and cost the government money in payments keyed to CPI. So the USPS is legally prohibited from raising prices to reflect its costs, and even the amount it is allowed to increase is artificially low.
The USPS is prevented from doing what every other business is allowed to do - change its prices to reflect changes in its costs - and then the results of this Congressional restriction are used in Congress as an example of how the USPS is inept and inefficient and must be privatized!
This legal constraint on the revenue side is matched by a legal requirement for the USPS to wildly increase its expenses. The same law restricting increases in USPS revenue requires the USPS pre-fund 75 years worth of retiree health benefits - while private businesses are being allowed to completely renege on even existing pension agreements.
(There's also a little backstory here about Congress mandating these huge front-loaded payments. The USPS had been overpaying into its pension fund and was actually going to be able to reduce the amount it needed to pay, but because of unified federal budgeting, USPS payments into its pension fund counted as revenue to the entire government. Congress required these huge payments from the USPS to make sure Congress didn't have to reduce its own spending. But that's a detail, like robbing a person already being murdered for their bodily organs.)
The goal of this simultaneous restriction on revenue and increase in costs is to force the USPS into bankruptcy and paint the USPS as an expensive failure so the public will accept having another valuable public resource sold off at fire sale prices to private interests.
Said a shorter way, what "makes sense" from the standpoint of the public makes no sense at all from the viewpoint of those who feed off the public.